It’s spring and people in the travel sector are all buzzing about revamping their websites. In many cases this will happen with little regard to quality information or navigation and will wind up with the site losing traffic thanks to deep sixing pages that have been indexed for years. Even with 301 redirection it’s not clear you can recapture old page ranks easily after revamping sites. The best advice for travel sites? CHANGE little with your old indexed pages unless you are having problems within search indexes. Add NEW PAGES to the existing site with information in mind rather than “improving the look”.
For reasons I simply can’t understand people in travel cannot get beyond “image” and therefore almost completely misperceive the value of designing websites not for “looks”, but for info richness. Although nice looks are not totally incompatible with nice info, one sees few sites that blend them in ways that will optimize the intended result (more travel related business in the area).
Errors like flash introductions and splash pages are simply too dang common in the travel sector which ironically still has simply staggering potential for sites that are built to help users find usable information.
PPC campaigns are far more common at the mom and pop business level than at the higher level destination management level where they’d have ROIs of ten to ONE HUNDRED times that of TV and print campaigns where the travel ad spend is largely wasted. There is still a very common notion that you can drive people to a URL using print advertising as effectively as with online ads. In fact the cost to drive people online with print is about 10-100x the online cost (I know this from extensive experiments I did in my past life as webmaster for Southern Oregon Visitors Association).
I’m finally coming to understand that as human primates we have a tendency to be stubborn and hold old ideas dear until the consequences become so severe and negataive or the evidence so overwhelming we simply MUST change course. Combine this with most people’s mathematical illiteracy and you’ve got what we’ve got – a LOT of wasted advertising buys in the travel sector, not to mention waste, waste, and more waste in all areas where human stubborness prevails over reason.
Joe Duck 
You touched on one of my pet peeves:
Those Flash intro websites are killer to view over a dialup connection and as the vast majority of worldwide internet users are still using dialup to get access, the dialup users can either suffer it out and wait, or simply click the back button and go somewhere else.
Only developed western countries have a large percentage of broadband users and even then most western countries still have nearly half of internet users accessing via dialup.
It really makes no sense to simply chase off half or more of your site’s visitors with a two to five minute download for a splash page that generally contains no useful information to begin with.
This mistake is by no means limited to the Travel industry, you see it all over. My experience is that “Marketing” people are more likely to be sold on web site “form over function” things like Flash, PDF downloads, heavy use of Active X and other “Gee Whiz” missteps, than are technical people who actually understand what really goes on “under the hood” of the internet.
More good points Politech, and certainly you are right this is not only in travel.
I wonder when marketing will evolve past imagery, which I’ve always thought is WAY overrated as a behavior changer.
I was mostly thinking from a search optimization angle (at Boston Webmasterworld site reviews both Google and Yahoo were talking about what a huge mistake it is to use Flash only pages or navigation elements.
I can’t get away from the flash on my site. I pay a yearly fee for what I have and that is not very customizeable.
Wish I were back in bend skiing!
personally i like flash and yes it doesnt really show much information but its more for people who would like to view a animation of some sort
I love flash sites but sometimes it is a distraction to the consumer.
Yes they can be slow on some connections and some people get tired of waiting
I like to blend the two in my sites. I like using a flash banner at the top and then normal content for the rest of the page. This gives you the graphics that can wow someone, but yet reduces the load times for everyone.
Some sites do things that are similar for major sites as well.
Another option is to have all of your flash files linked to your main page as options for additional details or information. Much like the Real Estate 360 tours of homes. It is just an options then and not a must view.
Lee the challenge with blending is that in my opinion you should assume that any navigation or content you have in Flash should also be present in HTML form.
Something I’d like to see studied is the extent to which Flash elements change the user experience at a site. Many say they like Flash stuff, but I have a feeling that’s a quick perspective and that regular users of a given site would generally prefer non-flash stuff.
I have used internet search engine advertising and what I’ve noticed is that even though the cost of advertising is low, the competition is rediculously high.
making good quality web sites and scripts i use xsitepro and it realy makes the difference.
I think flash websites can be good to an extent as long as they dont over do it, a good example is FHM.